Nicolas Cage is an actor who can be hailed as the greatest actor, or at least one of the most prolific with all of the movies he continues to make. Having won an Oscar and Golden Globe for his role in Leaving Las Vegas in 1996, and having a number of other award wins to his name, Cage has also often been criticized for some of his movies, including a triple hit of Golden Raspberry Award nominations in 2008 for Ghost Rider, Next, and National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Two years before that though, Cage earned his first Golden Raspberry nod for his appearance in the remake of the classic British horror movie The Wicker Man, and while some of the critics at the time stated the film was “unintentionally funny,” Cage has stated in a new interview that there was nothing unintentional about it.
The Wicker Man is based on the 1967 novel Ritual by David Pinner, and tells the story of a mainland police officer who visits a small island in search for a missing girl to discover a sinister group of neo-pagans who live there. The original movie starred Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee and is often cited as one of the best horror movies of all time thanks to its disturbing final act. The remake followed the same story and pulled from Pinner’s original novel as much as the previous movie, but it wasn't quite as well-received with filmgoers of the era, though it avoided winning a handful of Raspberry Awards due to being nominated in the same year as the Wayans’ movie Little Man.
Cage recently explained to IndieWire, "I know people had fun with that even if they thought the comedy was not intentional. I'm going on record right now: That is not a fact. Neil and I both knew how funny it was. It probably would've been more clear how funny it was if [producer] Avi Lerner let me have the handlebar mustache that I wanted to wear and be burned in the bear suit. That would've been so horrifying, but they didn't go for that because all the comedy would've emerged from this horror. But Ari Aster did it brilliantly in Midsommar. That was terrifying, but they didn't have the vision that Neil and I had for it."
The Wicker Man’s Story Doesn’t Lend Itself To Comedy, Unlike Cage’s New Movie
There are certainly a lot of horror movies that have comedic elements, but they are clear from the outset and therefore expected. Horror-comedy movies such as Fright Night, Gremlins, and An American Werewolf in London all managed to strike a balance between moments of comedy and ones of all-out horror, but The Wicker Man certainly isn’t a movie that landed in that ballpark critically. The film landed with a 15% approval rate on Rotten Tomatoes, and barely scraped back its $40 million budget at the box office. Though, many of Cage fans look back at the film fondly and it has a bit of a cult following these days.
Cage is now starring in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a film that has Cage playing a version of himself and, unlike The Wicker Man, really relies on him being…well, Nicolas Cage. Starring alongside The Mandalorian’s Pedro Pascal, the film sees Cage being offered $1 million to attend a super-fan’s birthday, which leads him to be embroiled in a government operation. The film currently has a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score after 21 reviews, with the consensus agreeing that the super-meta Cage vehicle is almost exactly what the actor's career has been leading to. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is released on April 22nd.